3. Did you know these stats about rape and domestic violence in the US?:

Few people realize it, but Justice Department statistics suggest that the incidence of rape has fallen by three-quarters over the last four decades.

Likewise, the rate at which American women are assaulted by their domestic partners has fallen by more than half in the last two decades.

A friend writes “In my bleaker moments, I think of my work as like the musicians who played while the Titanic was sinking — trying to create some beauty and ease and comfort while the ship, inexorably, goes down.” Maybe we’re all thinking like that, a good deal of the time. I do think that the best cure for the paralyzing helplessness that can follow reading the news, a despair I have been prone to at times throughout my life, is not so much reading the good news, as getting stuck into work that helps people.

Still, the good news can help. So maybe the ship is going down. But in the long run, we’re all dead, the planet fries and the sun explodes. And today, it helps me to concentrate on the work I can do, to recall how despairing I was about the world population explosion, global poverty and child mortality forty years ago, and then to realize how much has improved, due to the work of people who didn’t allow despair to paralyze them. Who knows what can result from a bit of grin and bear it, a bit of come and share it?

Thank you for these stats! Taking the longer-term perspective can be so elusive when we’re caught up in helplessness and “either/or” thinking. You’ve captured the delicious “both/and” intention of a well-lived paradoxical life! ;-)